The UK Labour Party Won Much More Than The Under-25 Vote

Jeremy Corbyn’s appeal appears to stretch well beyond the young people credited with fueling Labour’s election surge, a pollster has calculated as it suggests the Tories are only the most popular party among the over-50s.

YouGov, one of the few pollsters to predict a hung parliament before the vote, has produced a new analysis that indicates age is the “new dividing line” in British politics - with the older a voter the more likely they are to vote Tory.

But perhaps most striking is how that pattern is sustained until the 50-59 age group, as the graph below shows.

YouGov adds the “tipping point” in age at which a voter is more likely to vote Tory than Labour is 47, which is up from 34 at the start of the campaign and underlines the strength of Corbyn’s final weeks on the trail.

Social media appeared captivated with the idea, with celebrities and politicians sharing a super-viral, unverified statistic that turn-out among 18-24-year-olds was a thumping 72%, which appeared to suggest magazines such as the NME and Kerrang! featuring Corbyn on the front cover and the #Grime4Corbyn campaign sparked a youth uprising.

But another YouGov finding signals the 72% turn-out figure was well wide of the mark, and that younger people turned out less than average and much less than older voters.

“Despite an increase in in youth turnout, young people are still noticeably less likely to vote than older people.

“While 57% of 18 and 19 year-olds voted last week, for those aged 70+ the figure was 84%.”

While slightly older voters came out for Labour than has been written up - call them Generation X or those in ‘middle youth’ - YouGov thinks there is clear separation between the ‘young’ and ‘old’ and how they voted.

It reckons for every 10 years older a voter gets their chance of voting Tory increases by around nine points. The Labour-Conservative crossover now kicks in at 47, as the graph below shows.

Meanwhile, despite pro-Tory newspapers being highly critical of Labour during the campaign - notably the Telegraph, Express and Mail - hundreds of thousands of their readers still did vote for Jeremy Corbyn.